The roots of many algorithms and key ideas in style transfer can be traced to earlier work in texture analysis and texture synthesis. Just as the style transfer community has grappled with defining 'style' and 'content', the texture analysis and synthesis community has grappled with defining 'texture'. Probably the most influential in this effort has been Bela Julesz, who studied humans' pre-attentive texture discrimination abilities and designed algorithms to automatically generate textural stimuli [1]}, [2]}. He theorized that humans relied primarily on the first and second order statistics of visual features to quickly discriminate between textures (exactly defining these features would be a central challenge of later work). While he found that this hypothesis held for many synthetic examples (see Figure REF ), in subsequent work he and others found counterexamples pre-attentive discrimination based on the higher order property of 'closure' was possible [3]}, [4]} (see Figure REF ).
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